Computer programmer Dennis Ritchie passed away today at age 70. Ritchie co-invented the UNIX operating system with Ken Thompson at Bell Labs in 1969, while co-authoring the C programming language with Brian Kernighan around the same period. In 1978, Kernighan and Ritchie co-authored the book ...
I have some things to say in response to Mark Rayner's article, as personal reflections. BTW, Rayner did the usual good write-up job with these kinds of articles. But you know, I can't read these kinds of "What is a Canadian" article without making a ...
MacArthur Park.
I didn't need to say anything else, didn't I? MacArthur Park is that unlistenable 1968 hit whose only strength lay in the instrumental piece. How often does Jimmy Webb need to remind us that someone left his bloody cake out in the rain, then ...
This is more like a meta-review. I have gone to Canada Computes where nearly the entire Behringer line is sold, and was impressed by the specs. But does it do what I want, the way I want it?
I face a number of obstacles, being a ...
If u recall teh instalment ov "wwjd?", Jello Biafra discusd bout teh effects an politics ov all dat "toxic crap" which r affecshunately refr 2 as teh tar sandz.
Yesturdai, i read in da globe an mail dat pipeline rupturd on teh top ov hill. Teh ...
You know, I was minding my own business in this classy Chinese restaurant, engorging myself on their copious buffet, had my fill, and was handed the bill with an accompanying fortune cookie.
This fortune cookie (the one to the left) really existed, and I never saw ...
The following image is rumored to exist on recent T-shirts, the latest of many "Che" fashion statements:
... well, at least something like it. I haven't seen it on any shirt, but some are saying that they saw it on some people at one time. But ...
When I comment on technology, I like to discuss the good and the bad about it. I don't sell calculators, and I don't get freebies to review. That gives me the freedom to freely comment.
One has to admit that for HP to sell a $90 ...
I had decided to do my little contribution to society, and join LibriVox.org, and record a free audio file for them. My biggest problem so far has been microphones. I have an Optimus mike that was purchased 5 years ago, and had hardly been used. ...
With the levels down so low, my test recording needed post-processing. I used Adobe Audition 1.5. In most of these audio-doctoring softwares, all you need to do is to normalize the levels, so that "0" is the highest your levels should go. Audition had a ...
How to Make a Random Square
I have noticed that it has been difficult to elucidate a method for systematically creating even-ordered magic squares of any but the most basic kind. I don't know why this is, since the art has been alive in Europe for ...
I was experimenting with Danny Dawson's 4x4 magic square script, and began to consider writing my own script. But I just thought I would do a few runs for my own research. I wanted to thank Mr. Dawson for his fine work which I am ...
Maple is a robust math environment which can graph, solve equations, and solve for the unknown with the aid of its computer algebra solver (CAS), which is capable of computing exact roots of cubic functions, for example.
I wanted to demonstrate for myself that Maple could ...
Introduction
ONE OF THE few things you see on the web these days is how to do a really good magic square. There are many websites that tell you about how spiralling arrangements of sequential numbers on a square matrix is magic, but for me, that's ...
I have met with some disappointment as to how a methodology for creating a 4x4 square should pan out, and instead I have come up with many different algorithms, each resulting in its own small sets of magic squares, but had stumbled upon a set ...
Welcome to part 7, where the magic squares are 7x7. I don't know if there is any numerological significance to that, but it wasn't intended. Although, if someone wanted to make something of it, 7 was the number of known planets in medieval times, as ...
Once upon a time, around the year 525 during the reign of Pope John I, a monk named Dionysius invented the idea of Anno Domini by producing a calendar which marked the time since the birth of Christ. The numbering of the years was adopted ...
Recently, I've been hit (my website that is) by someone possibly checking his plethora of links from his/her website, and when I back-traced it, I find this cool blog which acts as a convincing historical shrine to the late great 1050 CHUM Radio in Toronto. ...
At best, these websites present these people as numbers first, people second. To what extent does saying that Marie Curie has an IQ of 190 or so add to or take away from her discovery of radioactivity or her other contributions to ...
SWAG has by now been so overused that no one, not even the generation that wear their hats sideways and wear their pants so that half their ass shows, seem to know what it means anymore. And I don’t mean that older people don’t know what they mean, but I am not sure that even young people do either.
Sure, you could come across a blog that has some kind of definition fo SWAG, but if it is from a blog appealing to today’s teens, I can guarantee you that 10 websites will garner 10 different and conflicting definitions. Quite often, if the website, such as a blog, has a message to say, then they often must take the trouble to inform you of which definition of SWAG they are referring to. The Urban Dictionary has over a hundred of definitions for SWAG (I gave up counting after the 20th page of definitions). Some of them seemed to get it right when they note that it is the most overused expression since the major media accused Pol Pot of being “Communist” (he was many awful things, but never a communist). And “overused” has a way of soon becoming synonymous with “meaningless”.
Swag Steppin’ at Twitter
In my day, which wasn’t yesterday, I confess, we had something called a “generation gap”, where parents often complained that they couldn’t understand us, but knew that we young ‘uns understood each other. That is, we may have invented some words to express everyday emotions in a way that seem to give an impression that we were the first generation that ever felt them, but at least teens could talk to other teens.
But what does it mean when “your SWAG is not up to my level?”, or “Mark and I are SWAG?” It might be letters that stand for something like “secretly we are gay”, or “style without admitting greatness”, or “stolen without a gun”, or “stuff we ain’t got”, “scientific wild-ass guess”, “something we all get tired of hearing”, “sexy with a bit of gangsta”, or … well, after 30 pages of SWAG, I can only conclude no one knows what they are saying to each other anymore. The young generation has reduced the dignity of adolescence to incoherent baby-talk.
From Return of Kings
I am genuinely worried about this since I feel that young people are losing the ability to communicate with each other. A lack of definition means that SWAG is a marketable word in advertising. SWAG means whatever you want it to mean, and so if you want to buy clothes that are “Simply SWAG”, or rings that are SWAG, then your only admission into this exclusive club of users of the word SWAG is to have heard the word previously. People who can’t express their wants or needs properly are also likely not to be able to think too critically — an ideal target market for salespeople. A mere generational gap has now become a huge interpersonal gap where the young have lost the ability to express their feelings, emotions, and opinions to each other. Relationships have become shallow, even by 1970s and 1980s standards, when many older people of that generation lamented that us young folk lost touch with seeking out fulfilling relationships, and afraid to be in touch with each other.
The YBF blog
It was not too long ago that SWAG was a word used at conventions and meant “Stuff we all get”, like T-shirts, pens, note pads, and so on. These things were often handed out at convention booths by vendors advertising their businesses to attendees.
When you brought your SWAG home from the convention, you had their names, their logos, their addresses and phone numbers, so that should you need their services, you knew who to contact.
While this is not the optimal solution, it looks like there is no choice. I had to go into the database to delete all of the comments in order to delete the 130 thousand or so spurious comments from spammers waiting in the moderation queue. So, to this day, there are no comments anywhere in the blog, since they have been all deleted. Sorry if your comment was among the casualties.
I haven’t published anything at this blog since mid-2011, and I won’t for some time, as I have to now fix the site. First, I needed to get rid of fake subscribers (over 15 thousand of them) placed here by spambots. Spambots have also inserted nearly 150 thousand fake messages should you like to hear about male enhancement or raft of stolen/fake Gucci clothing. The “subscribers” are easy to get rid of; the messages are not. I can get rid of them about 200 at a time, but the process is slow. Nursing this patient to health will take some time.
This site still needs its plugins re-installed, spam deleted, and other things updated. The whole loss of the blog was due to a mysterious (until now) bug that prevented me from logging in to do anything. I just got rid of a lot of cruft and installed a fresh copy of the latest WordPress source in place of the old code. Now things are comparatively normal.
Meanwhile, check out my more academic blog, the Pi Kappa Journal. The initials of Pi Kappa are my initials, I try not to make things too snooty around here, so there is no significance intended in the choice of Greek letters in themselves. There, I have documented many of my latest chills and spills into scitech.
Children enjoying some time reading at their desktops.
The debate over computers in the schools has finally come around to giving naysayers equal time. There was an article in the Sunday New York Times regarding a school in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley that teaches math, music, and other standard elementary school subjects in a computer-free environment.Computers are touted as an enhancer for learning in education. However, data is unclear as to whether they do anything at all. There appear to do some things better, such as helping us to visualise certain concepts such as transformations in graphs in math. But it doesn’t help matters if by grade 10 a student is still lunging for his or her calculator to figure out 7×6.
A famous american president, reading at his desktop.
The Waldorf school in the article appeared to have caught on to the idea that in order to learn something, your brain should be doing the work. A machine shouldn’t be doing the work for you. Otherwise, you are accepting your own obsolescence, and admitting to the world that you are replaceable by a machine.There is no substitute for a live, human teacher or the child’s own parent in helping a child learn. The Waldorf school bans computers up to at least grade 8, afterward allowing limited access to computer technology. Most user interfaces are braindead simple these days anyway. It takes you minutes to learn how to use your iTouch device. These days, if you have to read a manual to learn the operation of a new computer gizmo, the designers have failed. Windows and OSX are designed that way too. The learning of how to use a computer is easier than it has ever been, and students lose nothing by delaying their exposure to computers to a later age.
Tweet Computer programmer Dennis Ritchie passed away today at age 70. Ritchie co-invented the UNIX operating system with Ken Thompson at Bell Labs in 1969, while co-authoring the C programming language with Brian Kernighan around the same period. In 1978, Kernighan and Ritchie co-authored the book “The C Programming Language”, now known as the K&R book. [...] [...]
Tweet Well, that milestone had been past a couple of days ago having first been published on October 11, 1961 (I was sure it was first published in the 50s, but not so, according to publisher Simon & Schuster), but I must say it was my favourite book, and possibly remains my favourite book of fiction [...] [...]
Tweet Whether it’s in favour of Euthanasia, or whatever other pretext there is to make suicide look good, do you ever notice that people in support of suicide are still alive, and need to be alive to advocate for it? I dunno. Just a thought. [...]
Tweet For my math class, I was attempting to create a curve sketching question by writing the second derivative as a factorable quadratic, and working backwards to an order-4 polynomial. Along the way, I would fill in the missing constant terms by using synthetic division on an arbitrary binomial factor, and striking upon a satisfactory polynomial [...] [...]
Tweet I am a lover of satire, and I came across a great site called “Regretsy“, a parody site of “etsy“, which is a site for people who want to sell their arts and crafts. There are a lot of bad crafts out there sold by people who are often full of themselves (you have to [...] [...]
Tweet Frankly, I didn’t want to get caught up in the hubbub that has marked the 10th anniversary of the disasters of 9/11/2001, but my wife had been watching the TV about this constantly, so I thought I would weigh in on opinions on what has been called 9/11. There are a lot of conspiracy theories out [...] [...]
Tweet I recently purchased an OCZ Vertex 2 Solid State Hard Drive. The price per gig is enormous ($220 after taxes, in-store warranty, and mail-in rebate for a 120 gig hard drive), but is just the size to install the operating system and any applications I like. I generally don’t use the main hard drive (or [...] [...]
Tweet I always had an aversion to veggie foods. This isn’t because I hate the stuff; it’s more because I admit to quite a lot of ignorance toward going veggie and eating balanced meals at the same time. This doesn’t mean I avoid it altogether, it’s just that I didn’t feel ready to let go of [...] [...]
Tweet It has come to my attention in recent years that we are the stupid ones. Homo sapiens, as we so arrogantly call ourselves, might be the least intelligent of the surviving genii of hominids. Our species won out over Homo neanderthalensis because we were more competitive and selfish than they. Neandethals have larger brains than [...] [...]
Tweet Yesterday, I told another fellow computer geek an ’80s DOS joke about being prompted to “Enter any 11-digit prime number and press ENTER to continue.” She then suggested that a number with 11 1′s might be prime. Having encountered this before in programs I’ve written, I warned her that you can’t assume all sequences of [...] [...]
Tweet A couple of days ago at Harvard College was the first day that students had a chance to get settled away to their dorms; freshmen arrived with their parents, and clutches of parents and their young adult kids were clustered around the statue of John Harvard to have photos taken of them touching the shoe [...] [...]
Tweet I had been searching for a good USB keypad for use with my laptop. I prefer to enter sets of numbers using a separate keypad rather than using the “keypad mode” keys native to my laptop, since I don’t need to keep switching between modes if I am both entering a list of numbers and [...] [...]
Tweet 2:11 PM Tuesday 16 August I am sitting in the Catherine Stratton Lounge inside the Stratton Student Centre at MIT. At one end, a soap opera plays in a room where about 20 armchairs and couches are arranged on one end, theatre-style, around a 50-inch flat-screen TV. Only two students are lying there viewing the latest [...] [...]
Tweet 11:45 AM, Aug 15 I came out of the Boston subway system after taking the long way around to get to the Kendall/MIT stop. It’s raining, and I enter a building where I can get my first full meal, which is connected to a bookstore called the MIT co-op. There is a food court in the [...] [...]
Tweet I have had a problem with dust, hair, and dirt accumulating on my keyboard, going in between and under keys thus and over time the keyboard gets increasingly difficult to use, even with compressed air. Elephant adds a silicone covering over the actual keyboard. The form-fitting layer is completely removable. Cleaning it is a simple [...] [...]
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